I brought this book into hospital with me thinking – a cozy mystery, this should keep my mind off things. It did until I got to ‘… the both of …’. Then it started to annoy me. Then there was a second act of bad grammar – ‘… the both of …’ again!! Then the relationship between the main character and her detective boyfriend was just too sickeningly sweet. Ugh! The dog and rabbit making friends was sweet, but got a little too much and really, what sort of hunting dog makes friends with a rabbit? I hated the condescending nickname the boyfriend had for the main character, and the food they were eating sounded ick. All those croissants with chicken salad filling, not to mention all the pizza and other junk! How obese are these people? Pity because the mystery part was good but not enough to rescue this. I could go on but maybe I should stop my rant here before I get all annoyed again. You can bet that I am not going to read another in this series, or anything by this author.

I seem to be in the habit of reading books that are midway or the last of a series. However, it didn’t matter that much to me for this one. Wayward is a page turner, but there were some things that annoyed me about it. Firstly, there was a lot of short sharp sentences like this:
xxx
xxx
xxx
that were designed to build tension. They worked initially but then they started to appear too often which meant the tension evaporated. Secondly, evolution doesn’t work that fast. 2000 years into the future and humans will probably be the same (if we haven’t destroyed the earth by then). The creatures made me think of polar bears. They also reminded me of the Eloi from The Time Machine (so many time travel stories echo the HG Wells classic – I guess it can’t be escaped). Humans are also very hard to control – just look at any news story. The creepiest control story I’ve read so far is 1984, and this is because it is so close to contemporary authoritarianism (totalitarianism / fascism) that it is totally believable. But control only lasts for so long as so this story proves. The question I was always asking myself about this was what was the big man getting out of all this? I couldn’t see any benefits or pluses or… Plus, the big man’s surname was always distracting me because that is the surname of the systems guy at the department where I work. That sort of affected the tension for me too.

The ending leaves you on a cliff-hanger and the edition I got from my local library had a small sneak peek at the opening of the final installment. It didn’t grab me enough to want to find out what happens.

There is so much I liked about these stories. Brokeback Mountain is the famous one due to the film (which I haven’t seen) and it is a sad raw tale about two men and their love for one another, their denial of desire and the grief that follows. My two favourite stories are Job History and Blood Bay – just fabulous stories with great endings. I love the sparse storytelling style which sort of puts me in mind of the Alistair Macleod short story collection I read some years ago. Both authors have no nonsense style of writing about people battling to build lives in harsh climates. The people are used to hard living and hard dying and all the hardness but loveliness inbetween. Proulx shows a deep emotional attachment to Wyoming in these stories, just as Macleod did with his stories about life in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. I will be picking up the next volume of Proulx’s Wyoming stories soon.

I started a new challenge this year called the Read Harder challenge, created by Book Riot. The first challenge is read a book about sports. Now, I’m not a sports nut by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t even like sports. My husband asks me if I’m OK if I’m on the couch and the TV is on with the sound up showing sports. Heh! So when I was musing aloud about what book to read about sports, he got The Curse of Lono out. Thompson was a sports journalist and covered all sorts of sports. This book is one of his later stories and is about his trip to Hawaii to cover the Honolulu Marathon. He inveigles his friend Stead to come along and Stead does, bringing his family along too. Nice to have a tropical holiday away from the miserable English winter eh? Horrors! The weather is awful and the people worse. Thompson decides to stay for the sport of big fish hunting. Oh dear. Chaos ensues. I thought while reading that Thompson was in denial about being an alcoholic and a drug addict, because he kept on asking himself why he was in the company of dope heads. Hmmm. This was my first taste of gonzo journalism and I had to take little bites at a time. Plus, the book itself was falling apart. Gonzo journalism does have a certain activity to it though – it seems to throw or push you through the story – it is full of action. I guess this works for sports writing. Interspersed with Thompson’s narrative are snapshots from the last voyage of James Cook to Hawaii (which also didn’t end well).

Can I confess something? I am also finishing up on the Nth American Book Journey and counting this for Hawaii – the end of my trip! So from now on, it is going to jump around a little.

I chose this novel to read for Saskatchewan but most of the action takes in Los Angeles – Hollywood territory. There are two characters, one appears when a very young man and again when he is elderly. The second main character is a young man in the script-writing department of a movie producer, and it is he who drives this story forward. The young/old man, although he is a main character, lurks around in the background but is essential – he ties the past and the present together and is essential to the young would-be scriptwriter. I found this contrast compelling and kept reading, even though I knew there was a tragedy waiting to happen (the Cypress Hills Massacre). What was unexpected was the culmination of the original tragedy. Some parts of this novel were hard for me to read because it tells the story of early Westerns and the horrible treatment horses suffered. Not only that, but the attitude that people had to horses, dogs, buffalo and other creatures. It isn’t all grim though. The excesses of early Hollywood stars and notables was fun and takes the edge off the tragedy a little. But overall, this is a sad story but worth reading for the good historical detail.